Authored by Kimberly Hayek via The Epoch Times,
California Attorney General Rob Bonta served an investigative subpoena to OpenAI on Wednesday, according to a statement released Thursday.
The OpenAI logo on May 20, 2024. Dado Ruvic/Illustration/ReutersThe demand is part of the California Department of Justice's ongoing investigation into incidents arising from OpenAI's operations and its artificial intelligence (AI) models, including cybersecurity incidents and other risks.
"Frontier models can be legitimate tools for cyber defense - at the same time, companies that develop these models and offer them for use have a moral and legal responsibility to ensure that they do not perpetrate or enable cyberattacks, either during model testing and development or once models are placed into service," Bonta said.
"Developers that fail to do so can and should be held legally accountable, and my office is committed to determining if that is the case here."
OpenAI did not immediately return a request for comment.
Referring to the Hugging Face attack, the ChatGPT developer said in a July 28 update that its models bypassed restrictions in an evaluation environment and later accessed four accounts across four separate external services.
The company had been using that test environment to check how capable its models were at carrying out cyberattacks as part of an internal safety evaluation.
"We have been finding a small number of cases where the models identified and used publicly exposed credentials at the account-level on other publicly-available services," OpenAI stated. "This includes four accounts on four services as part of the Hugging Face incident."
In a prior statement to The Epoch Times, an OpenAI spokesperson called it an "unprecedented incident."
"We are conducting a thorough review along with external advisers and with oversight from our Safety and Security Committee. Once the review is complete, we will publish a technical report of our learnings for everyone," the spokesperson said.
OpenAI stated in a July 21 blog post that the models compromised infrastructure operated by the AI platform Hugging Face after escaping a restricted environment in which a cybersecurity evaluation was underway.
Hugging Face disclosed the intrusion on July 16, suspecting that an AI agent acted autonomously.
California isn't the first state to issue a subpoena against OpenAI.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall announced a subpoena on Aug. 24 demanding that OpenAI respond to an investigation into the company's "complete lack of oversight and adequate safeguards" for "rogue AI."
The inquiry seeks to discover whether OpenAI violated Alabama's Deceptive Trade Practices Act and other consumer protection laws.
"This AI lab leak showed that Alabamians' and Americans' worst fears about artificial intelligence are not just theoretical," Marshall said.
"After investigating, we now know that this particular incident was driven by a combination of OpenAI models - including GPT-5.6 Sol and an even more capable pre-release model, all with reduced cyber refusals for evaluation purposes - while being internally tested on a benchmark of cyber capabilities," OpenAI stated at the time.
Andrew Jones, cofounder and chief product officer at cybersecurity firm Adaptive Security, said, "This is some of the clearest evidence yet that an AI model can run a complete cyberattack from start to finish without a human steering it."
Later reviews found the AI agents knew they were breaking the evaluation test's rules, according to parallel investigations by OpenAI and Model Evaluation & Threat Research. Roughly 1,200 agents accessed an unsanctioned message board and sent more than 70,000 messages and files to one another between July 8 and July 13.
A separate case surfaced in September. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said an OpenAI agent gained unauthorized access to the public-facing Medicare statistics reporting service portal and accessed both public and non-public files.
Owen Evans contributed to this report.
Tyler Durden Sun, 10/04/2026 - 15:00A federal judge in El Paso on Friday halted border wall construction across Texas's Big Bend region, a stretch of the frontier that accounts for only a sliver of illegal crossings.
US District Judge Kathleen Cardone read her order from the bench, issuing a preliminary injunction against "ground-disturbing activities" that stays in place while the case plays out, the Texas Tribune reports. She found the plaintiffs' constitutional claims likely to succeed.
The suit was brought by the Center for Biological Diversity on behalf of the Friends of the Ruidosa Church and a local river guide and landowner. It targets the federal waivers that let construction proceed "without following the National Environmental Policy Act, the Archaeological and Historic Preservation Act and many other laws," per Inside Climate News.
The work in question includes vehicle barriers and access roads inside Big Bend's state and national parks, plus a 30-foot steel wall on private land outside them. According to the Tribune, there are five contracted wall projects in the region. In May, Customs and Border Protection awarded a $1.7 billion contract for border wall in Big Bend, KWTX reported.
The Big Bend sector covers about a quarter of the length of the US-Mexico border but accounts for only 1% to 3% of Customs and Border Protection's migrant apprehensions each year, according to the Tribune.
Inside Climate News reports DOJ lawyers "presented few counterarguments and did not present any witnesses." CBP said it remains "confident in our legal authorities to secure the border."
At the hearing, Adam Isacson, an analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, presented data showing Big Bend in "distant last place" in unauthorized crossings among the nine sectors that make up the US border with Mexico, Inside Climate News reports.
Tyler Durden Sun, 10/04/2026 - 14:30